Moneyball and sports analytics

Becuase I like fringe topics and new ideas Some of you may have seen a film called Moneyball. For those who haven't, here is the basic plot. An American baseball leaugue manager is in charge of a team that does not have thd finances to buy any big names for a new season. He teams up with an economist and they use decades of analytical data to identify players which have were overlooked by scouts. Some of the statistics s they identify as I.portable were never considered of any value prior. Everyone, including the coach are in opposition, but the plan moves ahead and they assemble a team based on these previously overlook statistics. They lose a few games, but then go on the longest winning streak in 100 years, winning 20 games on the trot. Leapfrogging sports analytics into the limelight. This is a true story. Economics seemingly has a very transferable perspective. Read a book recently call Freakanomics where things like dropping crime rates in NYC, sumo wrestling corruption and gang culture were analysed from an economic perspective. It blew my mind. When we look at rugby and how it has changed over the years. Many of the vital components a team needs to be succesful were completely missing 10, 20, 30 years ago. Regardless, today it's mental to field a team without some of these attributes, that never existed before. This tells me that teams, managers, coaches etc will follow the tried and tested until something has happened enough times and showed positive results for it to become an adopted strategy. If effective enough, said strategy will then be tweaked further. In cricketing terms, I'll say some names and you figure out the rest. AB De Villiers, Gillie, Sangakara. Every team wants one of these...yet before, as long as you could bat at 7 it was fine. Okay, so you know where i am going with this. Currently, rugby statistics are so very basic that if one asked a normal fan to identify important stats he'd probably be able to name at least half of them off the top his head. It is such a varied game with so many different positions and possibilities, i wonder if rugby is not victim to the same overlooking of important information that the Major Leaugue was. Baseball was/is one of the most analysed sports ever to be played and relatively simple as.compared to everything going on on a rugby field, and there was a plethora of valuable yet ignored information which proved right off the bat, once recognized to be massively advantageous. My feeling is that rugby holds a large amount of unrecognised information underneath just waiting to be discovered and the game has been organically revealing the importance of these stats to us. I wonder what would be discovered if ever a fully objective study was carried out. Dreaming, i know.

 Soon as he published moneyball his advantage went in the toilet though didnt it .And I would think that someone out there has tried to make rugby fit into it.Doubt if its the French or English teams though ! Kiwi teams get very good value for money as a rule but its more about identifying and develop ing talent rather than buying it in although...

Great book, although I think the A's would have preferred it kept quiet longer . If you liked that, read Flash Boys - another great Michael Lewis book. Did a bit of day trading in the past and I can say that I sensed some of what he describes there.
The statistical analysis that gave them such an advantage in Moneyball has been applied to other sports since, but baseball with its massive pool of 162 games played by every team each year is definitely the best application.
Dave Rennie and the Chiefs seem to be the best at it in rugby right now.
 

 The Aussies seem to be the worst at it ,especially the QLD reds.